Alex McMullan, CTO, International, Pure Storage.
By 2020, every human will generate 1.7MB of data per second. In addition, big data will soon surpass the 44 zettabyte mark. This is staggering when you consider that only 0.5% of data is actually analysed and used. Yet every organization, from automotive to finance to manufacturing wants to be perceived as a data company or a technology driven business at the very least.
Why the Imbalance?
The data storage space is undergoing a period of transformation, and many organizations aren’t yet equipped to leverage their most critical asset, their data. Historically you had hot and cold data. You wanted immediate access to your hot data, often running real-time analysis or AI protocols on it to extract insight and value. You also had cold data, stored away for recoverability purposes, typically on disk or even tape storage. Having these different tiers of storage led to increased complexity, cost, and inefficiency.
Several years ago, flash prompted an evolution in the data storage market. Initially seen as a premium technology reserved for tier-1 use cases, now flash is a must-have. Fast forward to today and NVMe is driving the next great advance in enterprise storage speed and consolidation. NVMe is faster and more parallel than SAS, and enables a significant increase in performance and density for those storage architectures that are ready for it - but we’ll come on to that.
By utilising today’s leading-edge technologies such as flash and NVMe, hot and cold categories can be eliminated as all data can be consolidated into one place, allowing data to be analysed in real-time by AI and ML protocols. This puts businesses in a much better position to derive insight from data which can be used to secure competitive advantage in their respective markets.
The Next Step – Data-Centric Architecture
Going one step further than making data available for real-time analysis is putting it at the very core of your infrastructure. Enter the data-centric architecture (DCA). At Pure we believe that as application architectures change over the next decade, the future lies in DCA. The concept is that tomorrow’s architecture will be centered around a broadly-shared set of data services, which enable data to be freely shared by traditional and new web scale applications. A DCA is able to take advantage of the performance leap granted by NVMe based solutions.
Organisations don’t run IT out of ‘Server Centers’ or ‘Networking Centers’ – they’re called Data Centers for a reason. Data is the key resource, and your architecture should reflect this. Data must be protected, shared, accessed and mined as fast as possible for the business. Until now, very few organizations have taken the time to step-back and establish an architecture that is not only best-in-class for today, but future-proofed for tomorrow. Deploying a DCA with all-flash technologies has become an inevitability, and businesses are taking steps to ensure they’re not left behind.
Put Yourself in Pole Position for Success
Matt Harris, Head of IT for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, will be speaking at Big Data LDN on 13th November, shedding light on how Pure has helped it secure an ‘unfair advantage’ on and off the track with industry leading all-flash solutions. Mercedes AMG-Petronas Motorsport uses Pure’s technology trackside, collecting data from over 250 sensors on its car, as well as at its R and D facility to run complex simulations, and to assist with the design of future cars.
Why not attend Big Data LDN to learn more? You can visit us at Stand 257, where we can discuss your use-case, and how and our portfolio of all-flash, all-NVMe solutions can help you build a better world with data.
At Big Data LDN Pure Storage and Tibco will jointly demonstrate the crucial role data plays for the Formula OneTM team including how to collect, manage and share ever-increasing amounts of data from multiple sources and datasets to improve racecar design and performance. There will be a press conference to this effect on 13th November.